[CORPUS LOQUENDI:] NOVA BOETIA: ANOTHER WORLD

[CORPUS LOQUENDI:] NOVA BOETIA: ANOTHER WORLD

Soap operas

Interviews

Mass media

In Nova Boetia - Another World, Murray conducts an interview with a Halifax woman whose obsession with the daytime drama Another World has begun to interfere with her job teaching ethics at Dalhousie University. (Remember that these are the days long before the availability of home VCRs). Her background as a philospher produces the cool analytical skill with which she speaks about symbolic, narrative and psycho-social aspects of her favouritte programme, in effect supplying us with a distrubingly detailed analysis of the addiction which has rendered her helpless.Murray uses as a structural template the real-time give-and-take of the interview. Whenever the woman speaks, we hear her whole answer and see her as the camera saw her, sitting on a sofa in her living room. However, when Murray asks a question, he inserts, in place of his own voice, excerpts from the theme song from Another World, along with lightning-fast collages of his selectively reframed listening subject (eyes, mouth, ear, etc.), reshot by a camera looking at the original footage being played back on a monitor. Since these fragmenting manoeuvres are put into place in the editing process (i.e., after the fact of the interview itself), the subject continues to perform her carefully considered responses, oblivious to the relentless instrusion of Murray's media interventions. In this way, Murray "authors" his subject; by reasing their conversational interaction, he appropriates her performance, isolates it within an array of media conventions, and locates his subject as both consumer and consumed" (-Video liner notes)

MURRAY, Ian

Jan Peacock

s.n.

1976

Creator: Ian Murray

VHS

English

Artist Video (V)

M87 976bc.1

19:30 min